A tape posted by Ukrainian security services in the Internet and allegedly recording a talk between self-defense fighters about the destruction of a Malaysian airliner is a fake, experts said on Sunday.

A group of experts studied the tape and came to the conclusion that it was made up of numerous unrelated recordings.

“This audio recording is not an integral file and is made up of several fragments,” said Nikolai Popov, a reputable expert in sound and voice analysis.

Specifically, the first of the three audio fragments, in which Gorlovka self-defense militia commander Igor Bezler talks about a plane shot down by the fighters, does not say anything about the type of the plane, the expert said.

At the same time, the name of the town of Yenakiyevo is clearly heard in the tape. However, the town is located about 100 km (60 miles) from the settlement of Snezhnoye where the Malaysian Boeing-777 airliner crashed.

Bezler said the talk had really taken place but the he had talked about a Ukrainian attack aircraft shot down by the militia above Yenakiyevo a day before the Malaysian airliner crash.

The tape’s second fragment consists of three pieces but was presented as a single audio recording. However, a spectral and time analysis has showed that the dialog was cut into pieces and then assembled. Short pauses in the tape are very indicative: the audio file has preserved time marks which show that the dialog was assembled from various episodes, the expert said.

A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The tape’s linguistic analysis also shows that those who made the faked tape clearly didn’t have enough material and time, the expert said.

That is why, speech fragments can hardly correlate with each other in terms of their sense and the spectral picture of audio materials also differs, the expert said.

But the most indicative moment is that the audio tape clearly shows that it was created almost a day before the airliner crash, the expert said.

The Malaysia Airlines Boeing-777 passenger airliner on the flight from the Dutch city of Amsterdam to the Malaysian capital of Kuala Lumpur crashed in the area of hostilities between local militias and Ukrainian governmental troops in east Ukraine’s Donetsk region on Thursday, July 17. All 298 people aboard the airliner died in the air crash.